What is the Typical Latency on Radar/Satellite Data | The WeatherAPI Community Customer Community

What is the source for radar/satellite data, and what is it's typical real-time latency?

I've noticed that the NOAA GIF images frequently have 20+ minutes of latency! We've been pulling our data from this link:

http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/RadarImg/

Here, the file names themselves indicate the UTC timestamp, which shows 20+ minutes of latency, frequently. We're looking for a service which has less latency.

Also, how come the wunderground images have so much additional detail, than NOAA? I would have thought they would have the same resolution. Are they not coming from the same source?

Brian Knox

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happy

Posted 7 years ago

7 years ago

WunderWilliam

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Satellite latency is about 5 minutes, radar is around a minute. So it's pretty fast -- we're getting it straight from the source and processing it quickly.

That's different than update frequency. Radar is about once every 5-6 minutes, satellite is once an hour for the western hemisphere, but only once every few hours for the eastern hemisphere.

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